THE DIRECTOR: It’s like— Moment to moment, you’re so— It is so enjoyable to watch people say language like that.

THE ACTOR: Yeah. And I thought it was, like— I think it’s like all classics where you realize, like, Oh, wow, this was new when it was done. Like, the whole idea of, like: Everybody, sit down, we’re going to do a game! And it’s like: A game? It happens now all the time. I feel like it’s such a cliché. Like, let’s play this game!

THE PLAYWRIGHT: It’s like two in the morning, and we haven’t slept—

THE ACTOR: Yeah. But we’re going to see this through.

THE PLAYWRIGHT: Yeah.

THE ACTOR: I was like, Why—

THE DIRECTOR: It’s a whole—it’s a genre that he created.

THE ACTOR: Yeah, he created a weird dramatic—

THE DIRECTOR: It’s like the Marital-Game Drunken Drama.

THE ACTOR: Yeah. Like, very good. It’s good. And they are good. God.

THE PLAYWRIGHT: Isn’t Amy Morton amazing?

Who goes to the theatre these days, and why? For decades now, serious stage work has been regarded tenderly as the spotted owl of American art—brilliant and nimble, breathtaking in flight, but unlikely to be found beyond a few scarce habitats. Every time we watch a trite blockbuster, fall asleep in front of bad TV, or click through to a YouTube video of yawning pandas, it’s said, our capacity for theatrical attention dies a little more. And yet, for all that, the theatre has proved strangely resilient, selling (even selling out) cascades of seats and claiming more college degrees than film and clinical psychology combined. Something is going right. Perhaps the question isn’t why some give up on the form but why others keep falling in love. What can the theatre do that books and screens can’t?

Annie Baker, a thirty-one-year-old playwright, is one answer to this question; she wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural, and emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time and space. Drawing on the immediacy of overheard conversation, she has pioneered a style of theatre made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention. “Circle Mirror Transformation,” Baker’s 2009 ensemble piece set at a community-center drama class, won three Obie awards, and was, in the 2010-11 season, the second most produced play in America. (The first most produced was “The 39 Steps.”) Her work has been performed abroad in a dozen countries; last year, four of her plays appeared as a book.

A lot of critics, trying to pinpoint Baker’s appealing blend of naturalness and precision, have called her a “realist” or a “naturalist.” She thinks neither label works. “I feel like we lack any terms for playwriting that come after 1890,” she says. “Realism, naturalism—are you talking about, like, Ibsen?” To watch Baker’s work is to be drawn into a world that feels as unplotted as real life (characters chat at cross-purposes; costumes and stage settings are uncannily real) but that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence (a hula hoop being spun for almost a minute, in one case). Onstage, Baker exercises meticulous control in order to make action seem as unrefined as possible. Her characters exchange the kind of knobby dialogue you overhear in diners on Friday mornings: mothers fretting volubly about their young-adult kids’ problems, twentysomething friends chasing back bleary silence with defensive nonchalance. (“I’m really hung over so you guys will have to excuse me if I’m like a little low-energy.”) Her goal is to explore what’s left unsaid along the edges of conversation: it’s the principle of looking at familiar stars so that the galaxies that can’t be seen head on appear out of the corner of your eye. The work requires tight coördination—not just of scripted words and silences but of movements, gestures, costumes, music, and the whole immersive apparatus of the modern stage. From “Circle Mirror Transformation”:

SCHULTZ: Were you abused as a child?

MARTY: I’m sorry?

SCHULTZ: Were you abused as a child?

MARTY: . . . No. Um. No. I don’t think so.

SCHULTZ: Okay. ’Cause it’s a common symptom among abuse survivors.

MARTY: Huh.

Pause.

SCHULTZ: Night terrors.

MARTY: Huh. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know what it was.

SCHULTZ: It was night terrors.

MARTY: Yeah.

SCHULTZ: Becky went on medications for . . . she went on some kind of epilepsy medication. It helped her.

MARTY: Huh.

Pause.

MARTY: And it’s a real—

SCHULTZ: It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing. Look it up online.

When Baker adapted “Uncle Vanya” for a SoHo Rep production, last summer, she worked to keep the language from seeming high-flown. “I have a list of all the things Chekhov does with dialogue that seem initially counterintuitive to writers who have learned a lot about plot and action,” she explains. “People aren’t listening to each other. People will be statement-and-response for twenty seconds, and then someone else will be like, ‘Oh, look what’s in the newspaper!’ ” In the graduate-playwriting program at N.Y.U., where she began teaching last fall, she points to Chekhov as a model of social authenticity. “She uses the word ‘organic’ all the time,” Allie Solomon, one of her graduate students, says.

Baker’s newest play, “The Flick,” opens in early March, at Playwrights Horizons, the Off Broadway theatre where “Circle Mirror Transformation” premièred. Like all Baker’s recent work, “The Flick” is the result of a close, fruitful collaboration. Several years ago, Baker met the director Sam Gold, and soon came to feel that she had found her creative partner; since their first collaboration, they’ve worked together on the première of every Baker play. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh! It’s an Annie Baker–Sam Gold!’ ” Louisa Krause, who appears as Rose, the play’s green-haired female lead, says. “Automatically, it’s got the aura.”

Since Baker started working with Gold, her writing has grown leaner. She’s come to see her scripts as “blueprints,” intended to be realized fully in rehearsal. “A lot of writers make their plays director-proof—extremely muscular, so that, no matter what the production is, it will be the play—but Annie makes her plays really fragile,” Gold said recently. “But the reason why they’re not more muscular is that, if they were, they wouldn’t be on a tightrope. They wouldn’t be so fragile and so specific and so perfect. She has to leave a lot of room in them, because she wants them to be razor-sharp. It’s the defining thing about the theatre—it’s not on the page.”

“The Flick” is an elaborate tribute to a fading art. As a teen-ager, Baker was an avid cinephile: at thirteen, she begged her mother to let her see “Pulp Fiction”; when she was in high school, the walls of her bedroom were covered with posters of films by Truffaut. Over time, though, she became disenchanted with what she found in the movie theatres—it seemed pale and controlled beside the live immediacy of the stage. Today, Baker doesn’t watch much TV. (She originally started taking some screen assignments mostly for the Writers Guild health insurance; her one idea for a cable series, about life on a commune in Bolinas, California, became a pilot script that never got made.) About five years ago, Baker went to the IFC Center to watch one of her favorite films, Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” and noticed something weird going on with the screen. “I was like, There’s something wrong, there’s something wrong! I’m not enjoying this; something’s wrong!” She realized that the movie, originally shot on 35-mm. film, was being projected digitally. “To me, it changed the whole phenomenal experience,” she says. “The Flick” draws from the disorientation she felt that day, but it plays formally with the idea of the theatre audience, too. Baker’s plays tend to be set in odd places: a community center in “Circle Mirror Transformation,” the house a divorced mother shares with her midlife lover in “Nocturama” (written in 2006), a trash area behind a coffee shop in “The Aliens” (2010). “The Flick” takes place in a small movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts, but the vantage is the opposite of the moviegoers’. Here, the audience sits where the movie screen would hang; rows of cinema seats climb the stage, facing outward.

One Saturday morning, Baker, Gold, their actors, and the play’s main crew met for a rehearsal, on an upper floor of the Playwrights Horizons building. “The Flick” has three main characters: Rose, who’s a projectionist; Sam, a thirty-five-year-old usher (played by Matthew Maher); and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), a young, fastidious cinephile who is Sam’s new protégé with the mop and the broom. Most scenes in the play take place in the witching hour between screenings, as Sam and Avery pass through the empty theatre with their dustpans, gabbing about movies and life.

The play, Baker and Gold quickly realized, was a nightmare to stage. An usher who has been snaking down Row 7, stage right, cannot suddenly cross the stage to deliver a line. Blocking became an elaborate chess game. Maher, Row 4, Seat 3, sweep, bend down to pick up wrapper, say the line, turn; Moten, pause in the aisle to catch the line, answer, begin sweeping Row 5. Maher, advance two paces; Moten, speak without turning. The play formalizes the invisible precision that’s become a hallmark of Baker and Gold’s style.

“I’m having a hard time, uh, ending the pause,” Moten said during one of several stops in the run-through. He and Maher were working on a moment, in the second scene, when Sam, a Massachusetts homeboy, joshes the aspirational Avery about his “shit phobia”; there’s an awkward silence as Sam’s mind runs dry of further witticisms.

“It’s sometimes a gray area between an awkward moment between actors and an awkward moment between characters,” Maher agreed.

Gold nodded and told the actors not to worry; this was the feeling they were supposed to have. He is thirty-four, with a patient deadpan, a weeklong beard, and tortoiseshell glasses. Much of his work, in rehearsal, is to act as an ambassador from the gnarls of Baker’s creative imagination, translating her cryptic silences and fussy requests into terms the actors can work with. (A characteristic stage direction in “The Flick”: “Maybe she incorporates a couple moves from bhangra and/or hip hop and/or West African dance classes in her past.”) “You have to learn to embrace that bad feeling,” Gold said. “It always can sustain longer than you think, because you ride a second wave, often, in these moments—if it’s just long enough, it’s a fine moment, but if you ride that second wave of awkwardness it gets good again.”

“Go for another lap,” Maher said.

“Yeah,” Gold said. “You want to go for another lap of awkwardness.”

Baker, sitting beside Gold, furrowed her brow. “Wait, did you say ‘lap’ or ‘laugh’?” she asked. She was wearing an open plaid shirt, sleeves rolled, over a casual dress, and fun, sensible shoes. (A couple of years ago, she got into wearing sandals over socks, but the phase passed.) She has thick bangs and wavy blond hair that is usually damp from the shower until early afternoon. Her manner is friendly and reflexively casual.

Maher asked, “You thought I said ‘laugh’?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why you were like, Actors! Whores! ”

The moment diffused into chuckles. But Baker’s concern had been real. Though her plays are funny, she gets alarmed when her work brings in giant, roaring laughs. In that case, she thinks, you’re laughing mostly because the people around you are laughing; you are losing touch with your personal experience of what is happening onstage. The immersiveness of the experience starts breaking down as a result—and what’s the point of seeing a show like that?

When Baker was seventeen, she started surreptitiously tape-recording people’s conversations and transcribing them, trying to understand how people really spoke. “I was like, Holy shit!” she says. Reading the conversations on paper, she could see not just how people spoke their minds but how they failed to—all the filler, the obliqueness, the false starts. Today, she gives her N.Y.U. playwriting students a similar assignment, not using a recorder but transcribing what they hear directly by hand. “I can hear my students’ voices through just the way they listen,” she says. “I always tell them, If you lose track of your voice as a writer, go back, eavesdrop, write down everything you hear, and that’s it. That’s you listening to the world.”

In Baker’s case, the result tends to be both familiar and strange. Her plays contain intensely realistic elements—the studiously plausible scenery, the lack of obviously purposive action—but they don’t always add up to a realistic effect. “They’re very strange plays,” says Adam Greenfield, the director of new-play development at Playwrights Horizons, who first brought Baker’s work to the company. “What she’s doing is not just trying to imitate life really well. People don’t stop and watch somebody spin a hula hoop in total silence for forty-five seconds.” The consequence is a kind of “zooming in,” he says, a reverent focus on the small, telling details of everyday life. “She’s saying, ‘No, stop: look at this, and look at this, and look at this, and look at this.’ ” Gold describes her work as being rooted in avant-garde formalism but “with an incredibly human and deeply psychological outlook.”

Before Baker writes a play, she spends about nine months reading, usually without a particular method or design. She reads history, fiction, and theory. Many of her models, she insists, aren’t dramatic—they include, instead, visual artists like Francis Bacon and Robert Irwin. “Irwin would never call himself a theatre artist,” she says, “but I’d say that what he was doing from the seventies on, which was making people walk into a room and look at it differently, is a kind of theatre.”

Baker fell in love with Nabokov when she was in her twenties. She liked “Pale Fire,” but she found herself haunted by “Pnin,” Nabokov’s satire about the hapless Russian émigré professor Timofey Pnin, lost in the wash of a foreign culture. Near the end of the book, after a “house-heating” dinner party he throws for himself—on the verge, unbeknownst to him, of getting fired—he begins doing the dishes, taking special care with an aquamarine glass bowl, a gift from his ex-wife’s artist son, that is his talisman of security and success:

Its resonant flint glass emitted a sound full of muffed mellowness as it settled down to soak. He rinsed the amber goblets and the silverware under the tap, and submerged them in the same foam. . . . He groped under the bubbles, around the goblets, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of forgotten silver—and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin rinsed it, and was wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow slipped out of the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He almost caught it—his fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the plunge.

Pnin hurled the towel into a corner and, turning away, stood for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. . . . He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, he went back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful bowl was intact.

Often, when Baker sits down to write, she says, this scene is at the forefront of her mind.

Baker says she has only two memories of her parents being in a room together, and has trouble, today, trying to envision what kind of relationship theirs might have been. When she was born, in April, 1981, the family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but she grew up mostly in the college town of Amherst, where her father had been an administrator for the Five Colleges consortium and her mother worked toward a doctorate in counselling psychology. (Linda Baker is now a psychotherapist and professor at Keene State College, in New Hampshire.) Baker’s father, Conn Nugent, was a gregarious Irish Catholic with a briskly pragmatic air; her mother came from a lefty New York Jewish family (“Baker” was originally Beckerman) and has a more circumspect nature. They’d met at a commune, in the nineteen-seventies, and shared an orientation toward progressive activism. If Baker had been a boy, she says, her parents would have called her Timothy Nugent.

When Baker was six, half a year after the family moved to Amherst, her parents sat her and her older brother down to make an announcement. The young Annie headed them off. “I’ll bet you’re getting divorced!” she blurted out.

“She paid a lot of attention to what was going on around her, and to how people were interacting with her and with one another—she was very tuned in to all of that,” her mother says. Custody was split; Baker’s father moved out and, a year later, took a job in New York, where he eventually raised a second family. Baker continued to live in Massachusetts, with her mother; every year, they would raise caterpillars into butterflies.

“It was intense to go back and forth, especially because my parents have very different personalities that required very different things from me and my brother,” Baker says. “I would train myself to be a very sassy, super-assertive person around my dad. Then I’d get back to my mother’s house, and she’d be like, ‘Why did you just speak to me that way?’ ”

“She thrives on confrontation,” says Baker’s older brother, Benjamin Nugent, who is also a writer. (His latest book is the novel “Good Kids.”) “I think our family was hard for her sometimes, because it wasn’t all that confrontational; my mother and I were quietly depressed in the years after the divorce, and I think her impulse was to try to hammer at our shells, to get us to be depressed more openly. I still see that shell-hammerer in Annie’s work.”

When Baker went away to college, at Tisch, N.Y.U.’s arts school, she enrolled as a dramatic-writing student. Today, she can’t recall why. “I was interested in writing,” she says. “And I was ‘interested’ in film and ‘interested’ in theatre. But I wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to be a playwright.’ ” She worked a string of odd jobs after graduation. She was an assistant residence-hall director for student ballerinas at the School of American Ballet. (It gave her a free apartment at Lincoln Center.) She was a contestant wrangler for “The Bachelor.” (“Awful.”) She took uncredited writing assignments for the extra cash. Her big break was with the quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” which hired her to write “throws,” pre-commercial sendoffs: “Don’t touch that dial—we’ll be back with John in the hot seat.” Later, she became one of the show’s researchers. But her sense of vocation remained vague. At a doctor’s appointment when she was twenty-four, her physician, filling out her charts, asked what her job was. “I was like, ‘We-e-ell, you know, I write plays, but you can’t be a playwright, so I have a day job, and maybe I’ll end up teaching or something,’ ” she recalls. “And he was like, ‘One of my patients is a playwright! A very well-known playwright.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but you can’t make a living as a playwright. You can’t, like, be a playwright.’ ” Her doctor looked at her oddly. It was the first time that she realized this was an option.

By then, she was spending evenings deep in her imagined world. “Body Awareness,” one of the pieces that Baker was working on during this time, centered on a middle-aged academic lesbian couple, Joyce and Phyllis; Joyce’s twenty-one-year-old, etymology-obsessed son, Jared; and a visiting photographer at the nearby college, Frank. As the four of them struggle with the issues of power and identity—Phyllis thinks Frank’s photography of women is exploitative, Joyce thinks Phyllis is envious and controlling, and both think Jared might have Asperger’s syndrome—their intellectual and aesthetic certainties peel apart. It’s a play about the emotional stakes of intellectual dogmatism, strung against a jaunty portrait of college-town culture, and, appearing at a moment when theatrical taste ran toward small and tight domestic dramas, it brought Baker to national attention.

Neil Pepe, the artistic director of the Atlantic Theatre Company, who grew up in southern Vermont, was taken with her portrait of crunchy New England home life when he read the play, in 2007. “When you’re looking around trying to find interesting plays, the first thing you listen for is the truth of the author’s voice,” he says. Baker was by then living in Brooklyn, and when Pepe called to say that the play was going into production she fell down in the middle of Clinton Avenue.

One chilly afternoon in January, Baker went for a walk in Green-Wood Cemetery, a five-hundred-acre expanse south of Park Slope. She wanted some fresh air, and she took a southwest route over some hills, toward the ponds. After a few minutes, Baker wandered off the path to take a close look at a particular headstone:

LIFTCHILD

Father Mother

Frank A. Jean G.

1863-1952 1870-1954

She rummaged in her purse. Names like Liftchild are the sorts of thing that Baker takes down in her notebook. (The notebook is a Moleskine, which embarrasses her; she’s afraid, she says, of being mistaken for the kind of Brooklyn writer who takes notes in Moleskines.) She writes relatively little down—she goes through about one notebook a year—and sometimes can’t read her handwriting. But the record of thought proves useful as she tries to distill several months of reading into a few hours of unforced action.

The more intensely Baker has focussed on stripping conventional dramatic style out of her plays, the further she has wandered from her earlier work; today, she tries to distance herself from “Body Awareness” ’s straightforward style. “ ‘Body Awareness’ was written with very little thought about physical space and time and duration and design and all of the things that I think are integral to writing for the theatre—the first things I think about now when I sit down to write,” she said, working her way around a curve in the cemetery path. When the play was produced, her favorite parts had little to do with the dialogue. Instead, she loved the drama’s loose ends—details she’d put in on a whim, like a small wind instrument that Frank inexplicably carries in his pocket.

Trying to find a technique to help her draw out these moments, Baker went to graduate school in 2007, when she was twenty-six. She wanted to teach, and, even more, she wanted to work with Mac Wellman, a playwright, novelist, poet, and professor at Brooklyn College. A generation of young theatre writers passed through Wellman’s hands; his students included Young Jean Lee and Sarah Ruhl. Although he considers Baker among the three or four best dialogue writers he’s encountered, he also believes that playwrights fuelled by nothing but their talents tend to burn out. He made a point of providing her with varied intellectual silage—“Finnegans Wake,” Wittgenstein, narrative theory, all seen through the dramatist’s eye—so that she’d have some means of reinventing herself if exhaustion or shtick set in.

Today, most of Baker’s plays begin not with dialogue but with a conceptual constraint. In Wellman’s class, she’d read Mary Douglas’s book about circular plot structure, “Thinking in Circles,” and wanted to write a circular play, with the focal point in the middle (a plan she eventually abandoned). She had also been poring over transcripts of Fritz Perls’s Gestalt-therapy sessions, at the Esalen Institute, in the sixties. “Circle Mirror Transformation,” the play that arose from this study, follows a six-week small-town acting class whose members progress through a series of drama exercises—reciting one another’s biographies in the first person, improvising sentences one word at a time—and, in the process, reveal so much that their relationships start to strain and change.

“The Aliens,” which premièred less than a year after “Circle Mirror Transformation,” may stand as the purest distillation of her ambitions to date. It has only three characters: Jasper and KJ, two thirtysomething slacker friends in a small Vermont town, and Evan, a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old employee at the café where they hang out. The dialogue is spare and aimless; almost half of the play is silence. “The Aliens” grew out of some readings of Wittgenstein that Baker did with Wellman. “The line between a really rigorous tractatus and a freshman in college going, ‘What if your red isn’t my red?’—it reminded me of all these townies with shrooms I had known,” she says. In one of the play’s sharpest passages, Jasper, an aspiring novelist who has just learned that his ex-girlfriend has found a new guy, recounts a conversation he had with KJ’s mother:

JASPER: I was talking to her about how I was always like getting kicked out of places and like sleeping on floors or whatever and she was like: this, uh, this in-between state, this being unstable or whatever, if you accept it—

KJ: Oh man. Was she talking about her Gender stuff?

JASPER: No. No. She was like: the state of just having lost something is like the most enlightened state in the world.

KJ is silent.

JASPER: And I thought of that last night, and all of a sudden I felt like incredible. I was simultaneously like being stabbed in the heart over and over again with this like devil knife but I also felt euphoric. And then I sat down and I wrote like twenty pages.

Back in Green-Wood Cemetery that afternoon, the light was getting low and russetty. It would not be long before the gates closed for the night. Baker’s conversation had started to come in phrases; she was trudging uphill at a steady pace and panting slightly between thoughts. “Wait, sorry, do you think that belongs over there?” she asked. Nearby, a garland lay in an empty patch of grass. It was white with purple ribbons threaded through. It looked as if it might have blown from a nearby grave. Baker wandered over and stopped.

“Do we leave it?” she asked. “Do we move it? That’s not a grave.” She walked on a bit, and then stopped and turned around. “Oh, God, this kind of thing will kill me. I will actually go fucking crazy,” she said. She picked up the garland and placed it delicately near the gravestone for which she thought it was intended.

Artists are pulled these days between two warring camps. On one side lie what might be called the Experientialists: those who believe that the point of art is to have the audience undergo a particular experience in time—and that the audience’s responsibility is to submit as fully as possible. (Think of Antonioni, who kept his cameras open to the unexpected.) On the other are the Arrangers: people who think that the role of art is to order, burnish, perform, and engage desire. (Think of Hitchcock.) Experientialism honors the artist’s sensibility: “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” may be dilated and slow, but it’s only by giving in to the author’s method that we can experience its genius. Arranging, by contrast, defers to the audience: what makes “The Great Gatsby” better than any of a hundred novels with comparable cultural freight is that it’s economically written and smartly plotted, seducing us without special conditions. Diehard Experientialists accuse Arrangers of pandering with “easy art” and cliché. Arrangers mock Experientialists for self-indulgence, tedious abstruseness, and bad faith. (The lousy Experientialist claims that his disjointed, boring novel is supposed to be that way.) The ablest artists are those who inhabit a middle landscape, mastering the art of special attention while meeting the challenges of effortless appeal.

Baker is one of those artists. Although she has a distaste for anything too polished or arranged, her work has an intimate, vernacular allure. She feels perpetually beleaguered by interpreters who think she’s trying to write small-town drama. She sees the emotional stakes of the world that she describes as higher and more ominous. Shortly after Wellman saw “Circle Mirror Transformation” and “The Aliens,” Baker asked him for his thoughts. “I said, ‘I see a side to you that the New York critics’—who are smart about her—‘don’t see, and that’s a hard side, a nasty side,’ ” he says.

In fact, Baker’s plays tend to center on a kind of mentorship. In “The Aliens,” Jasper and KJ act as adult models for Evan; in “Body Awareness,” Frank takes Jared under his wing; in “The Flick,” Sam is supposed to be showing Avery the ropes. The mentorship, however, is always dubious: the teachers are never people one might entirely admire.

“I think as a kid I was a little bit of an Alex P. Keaton,” Baker says, referring to the priggish, conservative character on the eighties sitcom “Family Ties.” “My parents have each been married multiple times, and I didn’t have a nuclear family, and there were a lot of people coming in and out of my life growing up. I found that very destabilizing and, as a child, very infuriating.”

When her mother arrived home at night, she and Annie would sit at the kitchen table and talk about what people in their social circles were doing, and what that behavior might mean. Sometimes disputes arose, usually because of Annie’s stern moralism. That attitude lingered until she was twenty-three. “I got really depressed, and was immobilized by regret and self-hatred,” she says. “I’d never felt like that before.” The realization that she, too, would make mistakes and hurt people “annihilated” her, she says. It’s this crisis in her understanding that helped impel her to make the emotional teachers in her play—the beacons of moral honor—people who are themselves failing in full-fledged adulthood. “The story of their lives might not immediately appear to be exemplary or what the younger character would want,” she explains. “But there’s a kind of transcendence and nobility they embody through having not lived the lives they wanted to.” Something must break for the glass bowl to stay whole.

The basement of a Washington Square bar. Several tables have been pulled together to make one long one; about a dozen students have crowded around it. They have finished the last class meeting of the term. The teacher sits in the middle, with a Scotch-on-the-rocks: her drink. The room is filled with cross-conversation; Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” is on the jukebox.

A STUDENT: I don’t know—I think the most dangerous thing is that I would stop and think problems and stuff. I think screenplays—you just want to talk story. And a play isn’t so much about story, it’s about the poem, and—

THE TEACHER: You know what I recently started doing—and I want to highlight this—I now negotiate in my contract for screenplays that I won’t write outlines.

TWO STUDENTS (together): Ooh!

THE TEACHER: I feel like if we all started doing that that would just—

A STUDENT: Woo-hoo!

They clink glasses.

THE TEACHER: I feel like it’s the most dangerous— I actually feel like Hollywood hurts itself when everybody outlines screenplays. And then it trickles down to grad writing programs. Like, I’m willing to sit around for hours to talk about what the screenplay’s going to be, and talk about ideas, and doodle diagrams on dry-erase boards, but I just won’t. . . . Because, by the time I finish the outline, it’s dead.

A few weeks ago, Baker began teaching her second semester of graduate playwriting. She gives her students a series of formal assignments, trying to teach them how to develop their voices within constraints. She has had them write an “Aristotelian” play, with a classical dramatic arc. She guides them as they try to develop a full-length script.

A particularly fruitful exercise, Baker has found, is one she calls the “scrambled” play. It’s meant to be an antidote to predictable narrative. Students write a play of at least four scenes. When they are done, they submit it to the class, and someone else in the class scrambles the order. If a student turned in a play with scenes in the sequence 1-2-3-4, they might end up arranged as 2-1-4-3. The writing that the assignment generates tends to be exceptionally strong. Is that because students are finally free from the stranglehold of dramatic convention? Or because, anticipating the scramble, they double down on craft in every scene? Baker isn’t sure. But the exercise may prepare students for the hardest part of being a playwright, which is handing your story over to other people and seeing it change—relinquishing control and watching what happens onstage. “What everyone always exclaims about, at the end, is how the order in which it was randomly scrambled seems like it was perfect,” Baker says. “None of us ever want to hear it again in any other way.” ♦

Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.